BBC highlights concerns over scientific publishing process

The UK’s BBC News has highlighted concerns that high-quality science is going unpublished, while weaker research takes its place in leading scientific journals.

Leading stem cellⁱ scientists Austin Smith and Robin Lovell-Badge spoke out about problems with the peer review process – the system used by scientific journals to decide which research is good enough to publish. In this process, when a researcher sends a report about their latest work to a journal, it is passed on to other scientists in the field for comment. The journal editor then uses the comments from these expert reviewers to decide whether the research is of a high enough quality to be published.

Talking to the BBC, Professors Lovell-Badge and Smith raised concerns that journals are relying heavily on a very small number of experts to make their editorial decisions. The two scientists argue that this dependence on just a few reviewers can result in excellent research going unpublished if it is not in line with currently accepted views. They say high-quality research is being under-valued, missed or in some cases even deliberately held back from publication by reviewers who are competing for results in the same field. Meanwhile, journals are giving space to weak research that does not move scientific knowledge forward, or may even be wrong, simply because it is in a fashionable area and finds favour with publishers.

This is not the first time the peer review system has come under fire, but Smith and Lovell-Badge believe the problem has now come to a head in the fast-moving and competitive field of stem cell biology. At a conference in June 2009, 14 leading stem cell scientists sent an open letter to leading journals expressing their strong concerns about the lack of transparency in the system. They suggested that comments from reviewers should be published in journals alongside the research itself.

Many of the journals’ editors said they understood the scientists’ concerns, but all except one, the EMBO Journal, considered the idea of publishing reviews as too risky. Now the BBC is bringing the debate to the attention of the wider public in the UK. Professor Smith says, "It is time for a level playing field in peer review. This problem is very serious because Universities and funding agencies now attach more importance to where a piece of research is published than the actual content."